This book is both an introductory textbook and a research monograph on modelling the statistical structure of natural images. In very simple terms, "natural images" are photographs of the typical environment where we live. In this book, their statistical structure is described using a number of statistical models whose parameters are estimated from image samples.

The book is targeted for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and researchers in vision science, computational neuroscience, computer vision and image processing. It can also be read as an introduction to the area by people with a background in mathematical disciplines (mathematics, statistics, theoretical physics). Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the subject, the book has been written so as to be accessible to an audience coming from very different backgrounds such as psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, neurobiology, mathematics, statistics and physics.